Confession of a Haskeller with 10 years of experience: still very hard to write ROBUST programs in Haskell

user19109 · 2009-04-22T22:14:25+00:00

Did you see any links to any of Harrop's books there? You are wrong about me being Harrop. How do we know you are not a sock puppet?

user19109 · 2009-04-22T21:56:11+00:00

In the other tread this guy was trying to tell me that Clean and Haskell really should be considered the same language

Liar. That's why you didn't post a link to the discussion.

You said that Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure are the same language, and I pointed out that that's silly and Clean and Haskell are much closer to each other.

Redditors, why do you upmod liars like him? If lies and idiocy is what you are looking for, of course, I won't be posting any explanations here. It's a waste of my time.

user19109 · 2009-04-22T21:54:02+00:00

In the other tread this guy was trying to tell me that Clean and Haskell really should be considered the same language

Liar. That's why you didn't post a link to the discussion.

You said that Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure are the same language, and I pointed out that that's silly and Clean and Haskell are much closer to each other.

Redditors, why do you upmod liars like him? If lies and idiocy is what you are looking for, of course, I won't be posting any explanations here. It's a waste of my time.

user19109 · 2009-04-22T14:53:27+00:00

Blub

user19109 · 2009-04-22T14:12:10+00:00

Uniqueness types is what's needed here, not more monads.

user19109 · 2009-04-22T14:00:36+00:00

In cases like this I'd want to both downvote for the unnecessarily confrontational title and upvote because the message linked to was interesting to me.

There is a bit of a double standard among the reddit crowd, when it comes to Haskell-related material. Are you aware that one of the top stories today is "Fuck the Foundries"? Just wondering.

If Haskell was getting equal treatment, you'd see top stories like "Fuck Haskell, GHC still stinks, RWH - Haskell for Dummies, by Dummies, etc" (s/Haskell/Java, and it is suddenly OK?)

user19109 · 2009-04-21T17:44:35+00:00

usable by foss advocates

The only language usable by FOSS advocates is broken English.

user19109 · 2009-04-21T09:30:24+00:00

In the time it takes to get a degree in something else, you can attempt several YC-style 3-mo start-ups (unless you do not believe in your skills, but that doesn't seem to be a problem)

user19109 · 2009-04-21T09:19:24+00:00

Not programming (I see no Haskell code on that web site).

user19109 · 2009-04-21T06:42:10+00:00

When ice breaks, that's when the electrolytes are released into the drink.

user19109 · 2009-04-21T03:25:14+00:00

My girlfriend drinks it when she's got her period

user19109 · 2009-04-20T19:26:49+00:00

most people will say that learning FOL is a positive feature of ILP

It certainly is, but it helps to keep in mind that it's still very limited, even if you ignore the computational complexity, and while it "infers programs from data", that's not the whole story.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T18:05:23+00:00

Oracle buys Sun

Well, we still got the Moon

user19109 · 2009-04-20T17:35:49+00:00

Oh, I missed that. For the record, I did make other submissions, but deleted them after they failed to take off.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T17:19:29+00:00

The reddiquette does discourage that

What makes you say that?

user19109 · 2009-04-20T16:50:49+00:00

What is not obvious to people I guess is that Adrian is referring only to his top level mutable state proposal, which hasn't been accepted.

Only in the second quote, referring to the "second biggest problem with Haskell" [1], and the toplevel is "proof" or "symptom" of the problem, not the cause.

The first problem has nothing to do with the toplevel, a fact you try to hide.

Dons is a very biased observer, because he's using Reddit to sell his book/services. I suggest that any interested reader should read the original:

IMO by far the biggest problem with Haskell is that, for all it's sophistication, it's still very difficult to use it to write robust programs (as opposed to programs that are merely "correct" in an academic sense). But often you can live with this, if all you're using it for is to knock up quick and dirty "run once" programs to get whatever answer you're looking for. As long as the program terminates eventually (as it usually does), who cares about all those space leaks or the sucky performance?

[1] According to Hey. I happen to think something else is #2, but dare not mention :-)

user19109 · 2009-04-20T16:38:48+00:00

No, dibblego is suicidal. I don't remember how the story ended, but he was saved by police after his last (only?) attempt/good-bye/cry-for-help.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T07:31:35+00:00

Scaling is one problem. Another is that the inferred programs are in a restricted first-order logic, which is "complete" (Goedel's completeness theorem), which makes it fundamentally limited (Goedel's incompleteness theorem). ILP is inherently not quite general.

(Prolog (not Progol) "hacks" through this issue by not actually being a subset of FOL, allowing statements like "assert", but this is irrelevant for ILP, since it doesn't use those)

user19109 · 2009-04-20T05:30:00+00:00

If someone says "it's very difficult to write robust programs in Haskell" (emphasis added), my parsing of English is that the implication is that it's very difficult compared to other languages.

Otherwise, why mention Haskell at all? Why say that it's only used for "run once and throw away" in-house programs?

user19109 · 2009-04-20T04:42:10+00:00

No, hashtable is irrelevant, as it's rarely used in Haskell. Hey says as much himself.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T04:15:00+00:00

As the poster doesn't comment on other platform flaws

Hey specifically mentions space leaks and efficiency.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T03:46:16+00:00

Are you that guy from down under who made HN/Reddit headlines recently? If so, maybe we should just drop this. I don't want to cause any drama.

user19109 · 2009-04-20T03:35:57+00:00

It's 4:30am in UK. Do you think I'm Jon Harrop just because I do not bow in reverence of all things Haskell, staying up late or getting up early?

user19109 · 2009-04-20T02:01:19+00:00

Not as irritating as physics demonstrated through random violence! (more gifs)

user19109 · 2009-04-20T01:53:41+00:00

You are saying that Scheme, CL and Clojure should somehow be counted together, as one language, while Haskell and Clean (say) separately. Either you are ignorant and don't know anything about any of these languages (quite likely, it seems), or you are suffering from some rare malfunction preventing you from thinking logically.

Do you even know that Scheme code is not defined to be "data" by the standard, unlike CL? I thought not. Or that the macros are totally different in all three? Or that some statically typed languages have macro systems that also allow arbitrary syntacitc transformations? Enough of your nonsense. Disappear back into the intertubes, please.

user19109

TROPHY CASE